Overview
For FM24 there was one clear brief: make this the most complete version of Football Manager, ever. With a new game engine and UI coming for FM25, I was responsible as design lead on a few features, including the highly anticipated headline feature of set pieces.
My Role
Design Lead
UX design | UI design | User Research | Information Architecture
The Problem
Set pieces had been one of the most highly requested change from FM's user base in recent years, so to finally revamp the feature, I knew there was some non-negotiables I needed to achieve:
Make the UI more intuitive
Display the new gameplay changes in a user friendly way
Address the users common frustrations
To begin, I worked closely with game design to look through users main frustrations with the current set piece system. We looked at feedback in our forums, on social media, and through playtesting.
This gave us a solid foundation to begin brainstorming and ideating on potential solutions to some of these problems.
The Solution
We ended up with an extensive list of improvements to the game, of which I began designing how this could all look in a brand new UI. I began sketching, wireframing and prototyping different ideas, whilst constantly testing different solutions to see how users interacted with each one.
After 6 months of work and iteration, we had the brand new UI built in game, and ready to be used by the range of Football Manager content creators across YouTube for their first impressions.
The Outcome
The feedback from our User base was overwhelmingly positive, contributing to 2024 being the most complete version in Football Manager's history. You can see what some content creators said about the new features below:
